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Here he goes again.
By Isaac Serna-Diez — Written on Feb 17, 2022
Nothing and no one can get between Elon Musk and a Twitter rant, even if it means stooping as low as comparing someone to one of the most dangerous and evil dictators of all time.
Musk has a history of starting drama with politicians, defending his wealth hoarding, barking that he would gladly throw his money at philanthropic organizations with no bite, and aligning himself with celebrities with controversies in order to raise his social status.
But the Tesla founder has just added a new person to the long list of targets of his Twitter fingers — Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Elon Musk compared Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler because of the Canadian trucker blockade.
More specifically, Musk’s “meme” was a response to a new move that Trudeau has made in his attempts to quash the ongoing protests about COVID-19 restrictions that are plaguing his country — which is basically what the truck driver drama boils down to.
Last month, both the U.S. and Canada imposed international vaccine mandates, requiring people entering their respective countries to be vaccinated, causing truck drivers who deal in the importing and exporting of goods to take issue.
According to the American Trucking Associations, only about 50% to 60% of all truck drivers are vaccinated — numbers that increase to about 70% to 80% when Canadian truck drivers are factored in.
However, the minority that takes issue with the mandate has spoken the loudest.
The truck drivers have blocked traffic in cities across Canadian-US borders as well as inside the cities themselves near town halls and government buildings — all trying to protest the new vaccine mandate.
The issue has gotten so bad, that Prime Minister Trudeau has had to issue a national public order emergency, which allows authorities to ban public assembly, to seize trucks and other vehicles used in the blockades, and to restrict travel in certain areas, among other things.
But the efforts have continued due to the growing support from an international right-wing audience who are watching, and disagreeing with, Trudeau's every move.
The newest move that Trudeau has made has also been hit with a wave of backlash and criticism.
For the first time since the law was passed in 1988, Trudeau has invoked the Emergencies Act.
For us Americans, the important thing we need to understand is that it allows the freezing of funds and bank accounts in order to disperse the protests and get the flow of commerce to continue moving forward as it has in the past.
These freezes can also impact crowdfunding through sites like GoFundMe as well.
If the protests are no longer being funded and the truck drivers aren’t getting paid, the hope is that they’ll be squeezed into going back to work and getting things back to normal.
The Emergencies Act also allows for the involvement of the military, but Trudeau said he has no plans of doing so.
As part of the Emergencies Act, the Ontario Provincial Police and Royal Canadian Mounted Police ordered all regulated financial firms to cease facilitating any transactions from 34 crypto wallets tied to funding trucker-led protests in the country.
And nothing could set Elon Musk against Justin Trudeau quite like a restriction on cryptocurrency.
Musk is known around the web as an avid cryptocurrency supporter — often boosting the value of smaller crpytos like “Dogecoin,” and vouching for the bigger ones like “Bitcoin”.
He also has a massive hand in the stock market itself because of his involvement in crypto as well as his own company’s stock, Tesla.
Considering a lot of these protests are coming from US truck drivers and cryptocurrency is universal, Musk stands something to lose by Canada halting transactions and something to gain by getting involved in the best way he knows how — cringy memes.
The meme is a portrait of the fascist leader of Nazi Germany, Hitler, with the caption: “Stop comparing me to Justin Trudeau. I had a budget.”
The budget part likely has to do with the fact that Trudeau has failed to deliver a new federal budget to parliament in the last couple of years, with the Hitler part having to do with Trudeau’s actions being compared to fascism.
Despite all of that, Musk’s meme has been hit with a wave of criticism itself, for obvious reasons.
While the suppression of freedom of speech could be debated, the effect these protests have on commerce are much larger than is being understood at the moment, so hopefully things will return to normal eventually.
Isaac Serna-Diez is a writer who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Follow him on Twitter here.